To provide a complete picture of the products we tested today, we decided to include noise, temperature, and consumption tests in the article. For our consumption tests, we used the same power supply unit, the same CPU, and the same memory all in an effort to have the AGP and PCI Express cards on the same playing field.

On this page, all performance was measured in two states; idle and stress. In our stress tests, we effectively placed a heavy burden on the graphics subsystem by running Orthos and Shadermark.

To measure the noise of the cards, we placed a noise meter 10cm away from the cards’ cooling fans. To ensure consistency, we also made sure to place the noise meter in the same position every time for each video card. It is important to remember that these tests are mainly useful for comparing the noise between the cards, and not for measuring how loud the cards would be in a normal environment. Our testing was done without the components installed in a PC case, meaning they can’t be used to effectively assess fan noise with the components installed in a case since it is safe to assume that noise is reduced with components in a case.

The GeForce 7600GT turned out to be the loudest card. This attribute can be accredited to its smaller fan, which spins at a higher RPM. It is also interesting to note that the Sapphire X1950PRO gives a low value in idle, however, under stress the noise level raises considerably.

The HIS offerings are much less sensitive to the stress level. The use of a rather large heatsink along with heatpipes is what makes the difference here and they maintain practically the same level of noise going from idle to full load.

We measured GPU temperature using Riva tuner, and our results turn out to be quite interesting. In this test we again see the Sapphire card perform quite well at idle, however, when placed under stress GPU temperature nearly doubles. The HIS cards end up being much more efficient in terms of temperature, thanks to the large cooling system the cards have.

From the aspect of power consumption, for the most part the AGP parts are more demanding than the PCI Express ones. We measured consumption by recording the overall power draw of the system. This means that there might be slight performance variations due to different motherboards being used. The RAM and the CPU, however, were the same across the test platforms.